Advanced Content: Benchmark, Research, or Market Index

Your content marketing plan has already produced a few white papers, datasheets discussing your product or service, and other collateral. But, you still need to build momentum to achieve your business goals. You need to keep the demand generation engines pumping, and start to make a greater impact on brand awareness. So, you think that you might need more advanced content for your next phase. Regarding your content marketing strategy, an 'advanced content' plan might help crack the next level. So what is the difference betwee an industry benchmark, marketing research, or a market index?

Market Research

Having your own branded, company research concerning your target audience industry - is an excellent idea. Good quality direct research is always a deeply valuable asset. Not only is it an excellent lead generator, but it is helpful at growing your brand exposure with industry publications. Being able to provide statistical quotes about your market segment, or target market; is invaluable and positions your company as a thought leader, truly understanding the dynamics of your business.

This type of research is typically market opinion based (surveys). It is often research in which you ask your target audience for revealing facts about their sentiment, use of a product or service, or opinion about a matter, direction or trend. There are many types of market research with varying purposes. Marketers generally use this research to support your messaging, argument, value proposition, positioning in market, or to identify a market need.

Keep in mind that developing your own market research is not cheap. You must invest time, brainpower, and creativity to set the direction. To start your market research:

• Establish the main burning question, topic, or theme you wish to investigate,
• Work out your target audience for the research,
• What questions will you ask,
• Focus group or survey question approach,
• Open ended questions, likert scales, yes / no close ended questions, or a hybrid,
• How big a group will you need for statistical relevance,
• Use internal resources, or outsource,
• How much budget to allocate, and
• Leverage a brand name or smaller research house?

One of the big questions here is this last point, about using a big brand research house, or a smaller scrappier player. Three things to keep in mind are cost, intellectual property (IP) ownership, and branding.

Big-Brand vs Smaller Research Options

A smaller research group I have used across a few companies is Clearly Research, headed by Tanya Pyshnov (not a paid endorsement, I have legitimately liked working with Clearly, and benefited from the results provided). Research reports from Clearly have been well documented, professionally analysed by statisticians, definitive, well articulated, and frankly - clear! For other options, ask fellow marketers - as they can point to other companies and agencies they have used.

Big-brand name options you can use include: Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Yankee Group, Abeerdeen Group, and perhaps 20-50 more high-end names.

Your choice here is important. Pricing for research for a sample size of 100 will of course vary depending on industry, level of executives involved, number of questions, and open vs close ended questions required. It will vary depending on whether it is an empirical study, or a qualitative investigation. As a rule of thumb, I estimate that a small research house for fairly standard research (100 sample size, 15 questions mostly close ended), might run $20,000 - $35,000 US. This provides the core research, statistical analysis (graphs, relevant stats), and a report. You will then take core content and write it up for your own audience, in your own branding, providing reference to the research within the report. In this regard, you own the IP, and research in perpetuity (it is yours).

Similar big-brand research is likely to run $40,000 - $75,000 US. However, keep in mind that the IP will NOT be yours even if you conceptualized it, managed the project, and created all the questions. You effectively rent (license) it for a period of 6-12 months. After which, you must remove it from your content assets - and may no longer provide it to prospects as a demand generation piece. Also, the primary brand on the research is the big-brand research house, with yours as a secondary. For maximum communications and PR impact, you will want to reference at least some of your own research - not only the big-brand reports.

If you have a sufficient budget, it is wise to use both approaches. Use big-brand research houses for some of your content and use the smaller research houses for more of your owned research.

Industry Benchmark

Yes, an industry benchmark study is a form of marketing research. However, the arguable distinction is that a benchmark report is targeted toward assessing the capabilities of the players offering a product or service within the industry. Here the idea isn't just to get a bearing on the market overall, and to understand the norms, practices, and usages by the end users. Rather, it is to provide statistical observations of the companies with offerings, to assess how well each is providing their offering.

An example is the Omni-2000 research developed by OrderDynamics (image above). Full disclosure, this was a project that my team developed, so I am favorably biased toward it. This benchmark assessed the actual capabilities of retailers around the world, to offer omni-channel retailing capabilities to customers. At the time, some of the often quoted research houses intuitively suggested that as early as 2015-16 up to 70% of retailers were offering these omni-channel services. OrderDynamics' empirically showed this to be flatly untrue, as the real aggregated value was circa 20% - 24%, at that time.

Beyond the headline grabbing hard statistical figures that were well quoted in the media - the research also provided retailers with comparative statistics and charts. As many details and slices of the data were provided as possible. Here the intention was to offer the target audience of retailers, a view of how they compared against industry norms. With this, it also showed the prospect the opportunity of either leapfrogging their competitors, or playing catch-up with their own capabilities. In either case, this piece of content revealed opportunities for the prospective clients.

Since this form of research is often challenging to create, there are fewer competitors who will take on creating a benchmark study. In effect, it is an exceptional differentiator for your brand, and creates a distinct added value proposition for your offering (being helpful to a potential customer). It is a great way to use marketing to create a distinction between your company and its competitors.

From personal experience, this type of content served many purposes. For our editorial calendar, it gave our content creation team many blog post opportunities, byline potential, media interviews, and invitations to various conferences to present the material. It provided exceptional exposure for a startup, building the image of a much larger player in the market.

Market Index

If you are blessed with being able to aggregate the data of many customers to create a commentary on the market or industry overall - take the opportunity. In this case, create a market index. Market indices are an exceptional way of keeping your brand name front and center on the minds of the media writers, media itself, and prospects. Not only do third party articles referencing your branded market index give you exposure, but it also builds trust and brand credibility.

From the RetailTech space, DynamicAction provides a quarterly market index called the DynamicAction Retail Index (shown above). It articulates various statistics about the market overall, derived from the metrics observed and aggregated from their retailer customer base.

Two more good examples are CloudPay's Payroll Efficiency Index, and ADP's National Employment Reports. In both cases, the two companies pull from their large pool of data from the payroll they pay out on behalf of many companies in the economy. In fact, in these cases the aggregated payroll data provides leading indicators for economic recessions and booms.

In the case shown by ADP's report, the market index can provide excellent eye catching visuals. These are often directly added into media reports citing the research.

Which to Use?

Industry benchmarks, marketing research, or a market index: which one should you use in your marketing mix? The answer to this is largely dependent on your individual situations. Of the three, the easiest next step for your content calendar, as you step into creating content which is advanced content - is the market research. It is straight forward, requires some creativity, and can be outsourced to a research house - which makes the job easier.

Benchmark studies require substantial effort. It can either be outsourced, or you can do it with internal resources (as I have done). Make it valuable, provide plenty of details, and use it to showcase your knowledge about the industry. This tool will definitely get attention, and provides a valuable resource that will be downloaded as an excellent source of leads.

A market index requires that you have a database of information that you can analyse and on which you can report. If you have access to such aggregated industry data, it can be a very powerful demand generation and branding tool.